| HB-268177-20 | Research Programs: Awards for Faculty | Megan Behrent | Poetry & Politics: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and the Women's Liberation Movement | 9/1/2020 - 8/31/2021 | $60,000.00 | Megan | | Behrent | | | | CUNY Research Foundation, NYC College of Technology | Brooklyn | NY | 11201-1909 | USA | 2019 | Gender Studies | Awards for Faculty | Research Programs | 60000 | 0 | 60000 | 0 | Research and writing leading to a
dual biography of modern American poets Audre Lorde (1934-1992) and Adrienne
Rich (1929-2012).
Poetry & Politics draws on the poetry, prose and archives of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich to develop an intellectual history that focuses on the lifelong friendship between the two poets and theorists who met at the City University of New York in 1968. Using archival research and interviews in addition to their published work, I examine and historicize Lorde and Rich’s passionate, fraught and deeply political friendship to consider how years of debate shaped the evolution of their political thought, their aesthetic and political sensibility as artists, and the development of an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist poetry and praxis. In doing so, I develop an intellectual history of their political thought as part of a community of radical, anti-racist, socialist, lesbian feminists, while contextualizing their work within larger debates about race, class and sexuality within the women’s liberation. |